"After I've had something to eat--"

The interruption was the noiseless entrance of a motherly little lady in
gray, with kindly eyes and a touch of silver in the fair hair drawn
smoothly back from her forehead.

"This is Mr. Stuart Ford, I am sure," she said, giving her hand to the
young engineer before Adair could introduce him. "You look enough like
your father to make me recognize you at once."

Ford was a little embarrassed by the gratefully informal greeting.

"Ought I to remember you, Mrs. Adair?" he asked ingenuously.

"Oh, no, indeed. I knew your father as a young man before he married and
went to the farther West. The Fords and the Colbriths and the Stanbrooks
are all from the same little town in central Illinois, you know."

"I didn't know it," said Ford, "though now I recall it, I used often to
hear my father speak of Miss Hester Stanbrook." Then he was going on to
say that trite thing about the smallness of the world when Adair broke
in.

"I'd like to know what is keeping Uncle Sidney and Alicia. _I_ haven't
had breakfast yet."

As if his protest had evoked her, a young woman drew the portiere of the
vestibule--a young woman with bright brown hair, eyes like dewy wood
violets, and an adorable chin. Ford stared helplessly, and Adair
laughed.

"Shocked, aren't you?" he jested. "But you needn't be alarmed. I have
persuaded my sister not to prosecute in the case of the snatched purse.
Alicia, this is Mr. Stuart Ford, and he desires me to say that he is not
often reduced to the necessity of robbing unprotected young women for
the sake of scraping an acquaintance."

Ford lost sight of the Pacific Southwestern exigencies for the moment,
and surely the lapse was pardonable. If the truth must be told, this
young woman, who had been discovered and lost in the same unforgetable
evening, had stirred the neglected pool of sentiment in him to its
profoundest depths, and thoughts of her had been dividing time pretty
evenly with some parts of the strenuous business affair. Indeed, the
hopelessness of any effort toward rediscovering her had been one of his
reasons for hurrying away from New York. He knew himself--a little--and
that quality of unreasoning persistence which other people called his
strong point. The search he had been half-minded to make once begun--

"I hope you haven't forgotten me so soon, Mr. Ford," she was saying; and
he recovered himself with a start.

"Forgotten you? No, indeed!"--this with